God it was hot here in Chicago today. 13 witches melted to nothing before noon, thank god warlocks don't melt (unless its the 3rd Tuesday of a month with an r in it). I went out at 9:15 to the grocery story, it was delivered. Then I stayed in and watched TV and read papers. Saturday's Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece on inhabitants of myspace.com and the reality its is becoming. I wonder if there will be an election in myspace land? The internet is just a bunch of tubes you know! But then I still believe in books . . . does that make me a 'nostalgic elitist"? Nah, I would be flexible, a book published as a web page with room for comments after each 2000 words would be fun. Communal, opposed to the solitary nature of reading text on a printed FINITE page (those people who read alone are plotters, thinking their own thoughts, plotters!).

I only ordered two books today, but I did buy one, a whim precipitated by a borders coupon (25% off, who could resist). I have a lit criticism book, but the cover of TURING'S DELIRIUM caught my eye, then the title overpowered my mind. The author, Edmundo Paz Soldán is Bolivian. A different cultural point of view for SCI FI/ Fiction finished me off. A check for reviews pointed to this (still in a pile here):

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16iyer.html?ex=1154404800&en=0be2ea72cd81c02b&ei=5070

a snip, how does it sound to you (opposite of newspapers and cnn?)

The author, who teaches at Cornell, is one of the charter
members of the McOndo
literary movement, an unmagic-realism camp that
believes South America today
lives in a different universe from the one in
Gabriel García Márquez's sleepy,
never-never Macondo, with its
ascending angels and insomnia plagues. It is a
point of pride with
McOndoites that, as here, the kids in their novels carry
"the latest Nokia,"
central events take place at an Internet cafe called Portal
to Reality and
Thomas Pynchon's recurring notion of entropy is at once honored
and updated
in a reference to a Web site called attrition.org. In
Paz Soldán's previous novel, "The Matter of
Desire," the protagonist goes
to a Bolivian cafe called Berkeley to talk to a
local band called Berkeley
about his deceased father's coded novel called — what
else? — "Berkeley."
In "Turing's Delirium," we first meet the most alive
flesh-and-blood
character — a drug-addicted prostitute — at a McDonald's. She
does herself
up at times as a "University
of California
cheerleader" (perhaps





unaware that the dreamspace of the
characters in the
new book seems to have relocated to the home of both global
circuit making
and antiglobalization protests, Seattle). (NYT, 16july06).

i can not resist this one....